As our friends the Tea Baggers have been temporarily instructed to give a damn about "the deficit", even while so many of them have been instructed to support deficit ballooning tax cuts for millionaires which will add trillions to the debt over the next decade, it seems it might be useful to run this chart for them, since clearly too few of them have yet to see it on Fox "News"...

Yeah, but the Teabaggers don't only support tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. They supported Bush's wars. They also supported the deregulation that caused the financial crisis which gave us the recovery measures, TARP, and the economic downturn. Every one of them. Well, except for Ron Paul. He didn't support the wars. But he's not really a Teabagger anymore. He's, like, the guy who invented tea or something.

Brad, in your spare time, you ought to snoop around to see if there's a Jim DeMint connection to the recent upsets in Senate races in Massachusettes, South Carolina, Alaska, and now Delaware. Namely, what are his contacts with the DRE vendors that service those states.

The problem I have with this chart, Brad, is the listing of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as simply part of the Bush legacy.

Obama could have taken steps to immediately end both of those wars. Instead, he has chosen to prolong the agony in Iraq where 50,000 American troops and nearly double that number of private mercenaries remain; where American soldiers continue to come home in body bags, the Obama administration's doublespeak about "an end to combat operations" not withstanding.

In Afghanistan, Obama has not only escalated our presence but has expanded military operations into Pakistan.

The TARP was a joint venture between the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration (also supported by John McCain).

To my knowledge, we have no DREs in Massachusetts. We do have opscan machines (Diebolds, I think; I admit that I still don't pay enough attention, probably because none of them are any good), and we even have a few places where they still count by hand. In Cambridge, we have AutoMarks for people who can't mark ballots themselves. I'm not as patient as Brad, so I haven't checked them out.

Local nonpartisan organization MassVOTE (www.massvote.org), which, unfortunately, doesn't quite get that voting machines aren't a good idea at all, does get that we shouldn't just trust them. In the fall newsletter, which doesn't appear to be online yet, is an article entitled "MassVOTE conducts first-ever independent audit of Massachusetts voting machines", which describes the organization's conduct of "the first-ever independent audit of an election machine in Massachusetts" over the "staunch opposition [of] Secretary of State" Bill Galvin (a real piece of work, the details of which I'll spare you; if you live in Massachusetts DON'T VOTE FOR HIM FOR ANY OFFICE EVER).

They managed to audit exactly one precinct before the SoS shut them down, and discovered, amazingly enough, that the machines did not count the votes accurately. If people are interested, I would be willing to retype the entire article into a comment since it isn't online yet, and I'm betting it won't be in the near future. It's an interesting look at how people who are smart and dedicated can still fail to understand the real issues because they haven't been educated about them. Given that I know the Executive Director, I guess I should do something about that.

Brad. is there a way we can truncate this chart on the right side and add to the left side? Like maybe a few decades worth of numbers on the left?

I know. I know. Past performance is not always an accurate indicator or future results......... HOWEVER, several plus decades of work with such charts and stats have proven true every time: tagging projected results onto charts of past results always results in misleading perspectives at best. Far more often the perspective is downright deceptive and confused.

This author is full of baloney. The sub-prime mess was strictly caused by Fannie & Freddie attempting to put Americans in homes, regardless of qualifications. Chris Dodd & Barney Frank come to mind here. Also, They were warned three times by Bush to curtail that practice via memo's and Frank stood before Congress claiming all was well! Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Also, after Terrorist killed 3000 Americans should we have just sat on our hands? We had to take the battle to them. Terrorist activity is way down now, and I personally feel much safer.

As far as deficits go, Bush spent too much, he congress spent too much, and Obama makes those years look like frugality personified. Obama and
his democratic congress has spent way way too much of our money.

As far as Bush Tax Cuts....Who's money is it???
It is American Citizens money..when did this hard earned money become the governments or their right to steal it from its citizenry. I guess that is where the original tea party came from.

"The claim will echo around the corporate media that this was the inevitable consequence of all Americans ‘living beyond their means.’ Don't believe it. The vast majority of people who will have to pay the price for this disaster are blameless. They did nothing wrong.

"The crisis was caused by an irrational free-market system and the insatiable greed of a small class of rulers who continually seek greater wealth and power, without regard for the costs."

The problem lies in deregulation which paved the way for Wall Street to bundle all mortgages (prime and subprime) together, sell and resell them as packaged securities, each time inflating their values.

As the authors of "Capitalism is on trial" go on to note:

"Credit default swaps are pretty much an invention of the last 10 years. Yet these financial insurance policies today may cover as much as $62 trillion worth of debt…

"No one could possibly claim that Wall Street's high-stakes casino contributed anything to the good of society as a whole. The entire world of credit default swaps, hedge funds, collateralized debt obligations and the rest of the alphabet soup concocted by Wall Street in this latest boom was directed toward one thing--make a tiny group of people rich beyond most people's wildest dreams.

"The financial catastrophe unfolding on Wall Street is the product of blind greed and arrogance."

Of course, what the authors of "Capitalism itself is on trial" neglect to address is that the encouragement for Americans to live beyond their means came from the same billionaires who destroyed middle class wages at home in order to take advantage of slave wages abroad ($2/day) by outsourcing our manufacturing base. These short-sighted billionaires are so consumed with short-term greed that they never stopped to consider that, eventually, there would be very few Americans left to purchase their cheaply made, substandard products.

Instead of blaming people who sought to house their families despite the harsh reality brought on to enrich the selfish few, you might want to look at those whose greed created so many who are incapable paying off these predatory loans.

Oh, as to your "whose money is this anyway" comment, Johnny Walker. Taxes are part of a shared responsibility we have as citizens to fund the commons--the public institutions that serve the public interest.

The American economy has functioned best when those taxes were based on the ability to pay--progressive taxation. During the Eisenhower administration, the top tax bracket was 90%. Today's hedge fund managers pay less than some of our poorest citizens. Sometimes these billionaires evade all public responsibility by not paying any taxes whatsoever.

High taxes on the wealth have the collateral benefit of preventing dangerous levels of inequality, which produces what we are now experiencing--billionaires creating political mischief by using their moneys to gain further personal wealth and power at the expense of society and the needs of the many.

People forget that there was a huge surplus that the Bush tax cuts and his phony "war on terror" immediately squandered, as the Bush administration worked tirelessly to redistribute wealth--upward! And now, we are faced with these massive deficits and your Republican pals who created it, who continue to support the thieves on Wall Street, have the nerve to complain about the very thing they created?

The problem is not government spending per se. The problem is misplaced priorities.

When government spends money on schools, health care, infrastructure, and the development of green technologies, environmental and personal safety (EPA, FDA etc.), the people as a whole benefit.

When government wastes our tax dollars on new generations of weaponry, wars, a foreign policy designed to benefit the billionaires who control the multinational corporations, subsidies for giant corporate factory farms, etc., it is squandering public funds for the benefit of the privileged few.

This author is full of baloney. The sub-prime mess was strictly caused by Fannie & Freddie attempting to put Americans in homes, regardless of qualifications.

That's true, if you pay no attention to actual reality and facts and stuff. The fact is (in addition to what Ernest Canning has already told you), no lending company was ever required by anybody or any law to loan money to anybody who didn't have the means to pay it back. Period. If you've been informed otherwise, you've been hoodwinked. Period.

Also, after Terrorist killed 3000 Americans should we have just sat on our hands?

Nope. We should have done something that would have actually made us safer, not attacked folks who had nothing to do with the attacks on us, and done it all in a way that made things better not worse and *didn't* bust our budget at the same time.

Terrorist activity is way down now, and I personally feel much safer.

No, it's not. And if you "feel" much safer, it has little to do with whether you are or are not. It has far more to do with what Fox "News" (and wing nut friends) tells you to feel than anything else.

As far as deficits go, Bush spent too much, he congress spent too much, and Obama makes those years look like frugality personified.

Even while Obama and the Dems (unlike Bush and the Dems) actually require non-emergency stuff to actually be paid for (it's called "Pay as You Go" or PAYGO and was instituted by Dems against the objections of Republicans. Go look it up and educate yourself) Unlike Bush's unpaid for trillions in tax cuts, unpaid for trillions in wars, unpaid for $800 billion for Medicaire Part D, etc.

As far as Bush Tax Cuts....Who's money is it??? It is American Citizens money..when did this hard earned money become the governments or their right to steal it from its citizenry.

Do you have some confusion about the difference between "stealing" and following the rule of law? It seems you do. I appreciate that when Ronald Reagan raised taxes 8 times you felt that was "stealing". But those of us who believe in the Constitution and e rule of law feel otherwise. Not sue who you think is supposed to pay for your war mongering or roads and police and fire departments and stuff. But I guess Jesus or the Tooth Fairy can build and maintain your water system and stuff.

I guess that is where the original tea party came from.

Actually the "original tea party" came from citizens outraged at unfair tax breaks by the king for one powerful corporation. But it sounds like you've been misinformed about that one as well.

It's remarkable that you're not embarrassed by knowing so little about the world in which you live. But it's hardly a surprise anymore. Enjoy your next cup of Kool-ade flavored tea. It's on me.